Blog
The Norton Simon Museum Los Angeles Offers Superior Art Work Despite the Lack of Crowds
Somehow, the Los Angeles art world has developed into a peculiar system. Museums like the Getty or LACMA have a reputation of having long queues on weekends. The Norton Simon Museum is located right next to Los Angeles and holds masterpieces of Rembrandt, Raphael, Van...
The Huntington Library is Three Huge Attractions Posed as One
When someone hears 'library', he or she usually thinks about a building. The Huntington Library Los Angeles knows is a 130-acre estate in San Marino with a rare book collection that features a Gutenberg Bible, a gallery housing one of the most recognized portraits in...
Griffith Park Is Bigger Than You Think and Almost All of It Is Free
Here is a figure that changes everything. Griffith Park is over 4,000 acres in size, which means it is about five times bigger than Central Park and among the largest urban parks in North America. Most Angelenos have explored less than one tenth of Griffith Park in...
Griffith Observatory is Free, Stays Open Late, and Almost Everyone Leaves Too Early
Almost everyone who visits arrives in daylight, parks poorly, walks the terraces, photographs the Hollywood Sign, looks over the city, and leaves before sunset. Meaning the vast majority of visitors miss the whole point of an observatory, which is that it works after...
How to Actually Get Into The Broad, Because the Tickets Are the Whole Game
The art is amazing, the building a landmark, but what determines how a day at The Broad Los Angeles turns out is whether you grasped the reservation process before heading downtown. This article takes access first, then art, which flips the usual guide structure. The...
The Getty Villa Has Reopened, and You Should Know Exactly What You Are Getting into
In January 2025, the Palisades Fire went through the canyon until it reached the edge of a Roman villa. Seventeen staff members of The Getty Villa Los Angeles decided to remain in their workplace during the night to prevent any fire spread. Both the buildings and the...
The Getty Center Is Free, and the Ride Up Is Half the Reason to Go
Museums traditionally open at the door. The Getty Center opens at a tram. You leave your car in the structure at the bottom of a hill in Brentwood, board an automated white train, and spend five minutes climbing the chaparral while the city disappears under you. By...
The California African American Museum Is the Best Thing Most Visitors Walk Straight Past
Get to Exposition Park on a Saturday and watch the visitors go through. Families head from the parking structures toward the dinosaurs at one museum and the space shuttle at another, and in-between both those spots, they walk straight past a low and elegant building,...
MOCA Pacific Design Center and the Question Everyone Asks About it
Google the name, and you will find lots of listings with a strikethrough. Let me save you the trip right now. The MOCA Pacific Design Center closed its doors permanently on 24 February 2019, after eighteen years of operating as MOCA's West Hollywood satellite. It is...
Skirball Cultural Center and the Ark that People Visit For
If you were to ask a random ten families from this area why they traveled up to the Sepulveda Pass, nine out of those ten would give you the same answer. Noah's Ark. Skirball Cultural Center has a permanent children's exhibition which is so impressive that it has...
Three Uses of the Hammer Museum Los Angeles
Most tour guides assume that a museum is one place and one activity you do once. That does not apply to this one. The Hammer Museum Los Angeles has three completely distinct uses and each of the locals who love it is likely to use it for another purpose. First, the...
AMC The Grove 14 and the Reason a Movie at This Cinema Is More Than a Movie
It is no coincidence that people choose to watch films at AMC The Grove 14 even if it means driving past three closer cinemas. AMC The Grove 14 is not an ordinary multiplex, and calling it a mall cinema is like calling The Chateau Marmont in Hollywood just a hotel....
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures – A Floor-by-Floor Guide to Getting It Right
Everybody who comes into this building gets one thing wrong. They start on the ground floor, wander and run out of steam somewhere between the third and the fourth levels. And it's a shame, because the best stuff is still ahead of them at that point. The Academy...
Craft Contemporary LA and the Case for Culture You Do With Your Hands
There is a whole category of Los Angeles culture built for looking. Paintings behind glass. Sculptures behind ropes. And then there is Craft Contemporary LA, the small museum on Wilshire that has spent decades arguing the opposite case - that art made from clay,...
David Kordansky Gallery and the Very LA Story of How It Got Here
Some galleries arrive in Los Angeles fully formed, branches of empires headquartered elsewhere. This one grew here. David Kordansky Gallery started in 2003 in a scrappy corner of Chinatown, when that neighborhood was the city's incubator for young art spaces, and it...















